Engineering

Professionalism
Account of Professionalism
By Socrates, David

• Profession
• A number of individuals in the same occupation voluntarily
organized to earn a living by openly serving a moral ideal in
morally permissible way beyond what law, market, morality,
and public opinion would otherwise require. -Highlights several
features that are important concepts of professionalism
Important features
• A profession cannot be composed of only one person.
• A profession involves a public element.
• A profession is a way people earn a living and usually
something that occupies them during their working
hours. (occupation)
• A profession is something that people enter into
voluntarily and they can leave voluntarily.
• Profession must serve some morally praiseworthy goal.
• Example: Physician cure sick people, Lawyer help people obtain justice within the
law.
• Professionals must pursue a morally praiseworthy goal
by morally permissible means.
• Ethical standards in a profession should obligate
professionals to act on some way that goes beyond
what law, market, morality, and public opinion would
otherwise require.
Engineering and
Professionalism
• Engineering as profession
• A group activity, which openly professes special knowledge,
skill, and judgment.
• It is the occupation by which most engineers earn their living,
and it is entered into voluntarily.
• Serves a morally good end, namely the production of
technology for the benefit of mankind.
• Have special obligation, including protecting the health and
safety of the public, as this is affected by technology.
• Models of Professionalism
• The Business model
• Occupation is primarily oriented toward making a profit within the
boundaries set by law.
• Increase income and protect themselves from government regulations
• Promote the ideal of self-regulation
• Seek profit by selling physical products (professionals sell expertise)
• Professional model
• Have an implicit trust relationship with the larger public.
• Social contract
• Agreed to regulate themselves in accordance with high
standards of technical competence and ethical practice.
Types of Ethics or Morality
• Common morality
• A set of moral beliefs shared by almost everyone.
• The basis or at least the reference point for the other types of morality.
• Characteristics:
• Designed primarily to protect individuals from various types of violations or
invasions from their personhood by others. (negative)
• Example: killing a person, lying to a person, stealing from a person..
• Contain a positive or aspirational component.
• Example: protect natural environment, promote human happiness…
• Makes a distinction between an evaluation of person’s actions and an evaluation
of his intension.
• Evaluation of action is based on an application of types of moral percepts, but an
evaluation of the person himself is based on intension.
• Example:
• If a driver kills a pedestrian in his automobile accidentally, he may be
charged with manslaughter but not murder. The pedestrian is just as
dead as if he had been murdered, but the driver’s intension was not to
kill him. The result of the actions is the same but the intent is
different.

• If you convey false information to another person with the intent to

deceive, you are lying. If you convey the same false information
because you do not know any better, you are not lying and not usually
as morally culpable. Again the result is the same but the intent is
different.
• Personal Morality
• Is the set of moral beliefs that a person holds. Most of us, our
personal moral beliefs closely parallel the percepts of common
morality.
• Examples:
• Stem cell research
• Professional Ethics
• Set of standards adopted by professionals insofar as they view
themselves acting as professionals.
• Characteristics:
• Unlike common morality and personal morality, professional ethics is
usually stated in a formal code.
• The professional codes of ethics of a given profession focus on the
issues that are important in that profession.
• Example:
• Perjury is not an issue in that is relevant to medicine or dentistry
• Privacy, IP, and copyright / patents are topics not covered in most of the
engineering codes.
• When one is in a professional relationship, professional ethics is
supposed to take precedence over personal morality.
• Characteristics of professional ethics has an important advantage, but it
can also produce complications
Personal morality vs Professional
morality
• A pharmacy refuse to sell contraceptives for unmarried
because their moral beliefs hold that sex before
marriage is wrong. But the professional code makes no
provision for refusing to fill a prescription on the basis of
an objection from one’s personal moral beliefs.

• Attorneys may refuse to take a client if they believe the

client’s cause is immoral, but they have obligation to
refer the prospective client to another attorney.